Cycling Odysseys

“Truly, truly, I praise them with the highest compliment I, Patrick Santino, can give. Their ascent up this Col du Portet reminded me of my days of most yore: to the memories I have of Andy Schleck and Alberto Contador duking it out round for round on the third week Pyrenean climbs of the 2010 Tour. If you listen to my first Introduction episode you will understand why I hold those days in such mythically high regard.”

“But should one of the four KOM Hunters have escaped, at what cost would this have come for the final two rounds tomorrow and Thursday where more weighty and higher ranking mountains loom? We shall not find out, because the KOM Hunters called a truce. There would be no race for the Polka-Dots today…but there would be for Green.”

“Ah! Ah! It was one of those stages where the most obsessed fans began watching eagerly early, for the profile contained so many jagged high peaks surely it would be a fierce battle for KOM Points at the top of every climb! And the obsessed fans were right: all four riders at the top of the KOM Classification were in the breakaway today hunting for Polka-Dot Points”

"The vanguard is the leading company or unit at the front-and-center of the battleline....In cycling, such terms of ancient and medieval warfare can often easily be applied to the peloton, but they are always in a way twisted. For though the peloton travels together like an army on an Odyssey, the wars the riders wage are not against the locals whose homelands they are invading, but are pitched battles of civil war between themselves."

“In order to keep my word I shall now hop off the fence and take a stance. The time for objective impartial viewing of both sides of the argument has been done, and now must be set aside. The road has met the rubber. The pushes have come to shoves.”

"It was a fun finale to watch beyond the tactical racing itself. The gravitas of the Tour permeated this end game...Yes, whichever of these four men won: this—a Tour de France stage win—would be the biggest victory of their career…and we all had front row seating to watch it happen.

“Should people have earmarked certain stages for Wout Van Aert to win, he could have been considered a strong favorite for about 15 of the 21, and this Double Ventoux stage was definitely one of the 6 he was unsuited for. But we are in the Second Golden Age of cycling because the generational stars, the top showmen of the sport like this Wout Van Aert still surprise us."

"After his second stage win this Tour, I had declared that we were all back on Record Watch. Even more so today, the Cannibal Eddy Merckx’s record of 34 Tour stages is no longer at all safe. So let us have a conversation that was probably taking place a decade ago in 2011, finally now is the appropriate time to rehash it. "

“After two years of waiting, finally the Tour was going to make it to Tignes this day. O! But this long descent before the equally long Tignes climb could not be underestimated. If the riders did not take proper care of themselves on the way down, surely the freezing conditions would sap their strength and health for the long final ascent. Thus it was time for the second annual Unofficial Rain Jacket World Championships.”

"With only some 40km left in the stage that were all either serious climbing or high-speed descending, Tadej Pogacar must have decided the time was right to stamp his authority on this race. Though he seems on friendly terms with them, surely after a week of dealing with the antics and audacious tactics of the Mighty Aces, Tadej Pogacar had had enough."